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Iddo Genuth writes "At precisely 10:49 p.m. EST, NASA's 'Kepler' telescope was successfully kicked off into space, embarking on a mission that the agency says 'may fundamentally change humanity's view of itself.' The telescope will search the nearby region of our galaxy for the first time looking for Earth-size planets, which orbit stars at distances where temperatures permit liquid water to endure on their surface — a region often referred to as the 'habitable' zone."

Do we really want the other worlds' explorers coming here? Let's see what we humans have done to new lands: genocide, penal colony, battleground, food resource, or tourist trap. I vote we use Kepler to watch out for the scumballs, so we can prepare to zap them before they arrive.

So let's do our best to make sure that when/if we encounter other civilization(s), we're the more advanced one... Or we're the one that encounters the aliens, not that the aliens encounter us, here on Earth.

That's why I like film "Liquid Sky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Sky)." Instead of coming to the Earth to help us or destroy us, the aliens came to Earth looking for drugs.

A low budget classic (I have the movie on VHS). The humans were social outliers and were indeed on drugs quite a lot, but the aliens preferred leeching sex energy. Unfortunately the aliens were a bit greedy and people began dying during orgasm...

If it were shown to the politicos, they'd panic (the horror: dallying with interns becoming fatal). NASA's budget would be either slashed or weaponized!

When in human history has encountering a more advanced civilisation ever been good for a less advanced civilisation?

Japan didn't do too badly; once they realised how backward they were they acted quickly to catch up, taking less than ninety years from the Black Ships to Pearl Harbour. A case could perhaps be made for India, whose existence as a unified state rather than countless squabbling principalities is largely a result of the Raj. And awful though the Conquistadors were, the Aztec Empire was a brutal tyranny that enslaved all its neighbours, who were very glad indeed to see the back of Montezuma.

To be fair, though, for the tribes that were under Aztec domination, the arrival of the Spaniards was simply the exchange of one brutal enslaver for another.

Well yeah, but at least the Spaniards only shot them or occasionally burned them at the stake, instead of ripping their beating hearts of out their chests as part of the daily ritual in the town square. I mean, come on, you have to acknowledge progress, even when it's just incremental. Also, the Spaniards spoke Spanish, which was already being used a

Not saying it isn't true, but I hadn't heard that many were murdered. I know many died from disease, which the Spaniards doubtless didn't know much about themselves. Can you provide a reference? Truly curious.

You haven't heard? They told them to fill rooms up to a certain level with gold, or their king (a god to them) would die. And when the room was full, they killed the king anyway. And then butchered them all.Default tactic.

You have to read up on that part of history. Not much different from the horrors of the Nazis and Stalin. Just not that prominent.

I read a very interesting article in the German version of the Scientific American (called "Spektrum der Wissenschaft"). Thene "barbarians" were not barbaric at all. That's revisionist history. They just freed their land from the foreign dominance of a empire that was falling apart.

In fact, they had a very high culture, and many traditions got included into the Roman set of traditions. Even the west-European Christmas and Eastern come from those traditions.

A number of examples. Italian peninsula during the time of Greek colonization, Japan in 1853 (as mentioned by another replier), the neighbors of China, some advanced empires have proven beneficial to their subjects.

The Romans did pretty well when they conquered the (arguably more advanced) Greeks and Egyptians. The Mongols conquered the far more advanced Chinese and assimilated into its culture; Kublai Khan is one of the great leaders of China.

I say lets four founding into research so we ensure we are the most advanced race. In all seriousness, a thing or two has happened since Europeans first set foot in America. Like how we do not contact the less advanced Indians still living in isolation in the amazon.

Do we really want the other worlds' explorers coming here? Let's see what we humans have done to new lands: genocide, penal colony, battleground, food resource, or tourist trap. I vote we use Kepler to watch out for the scumballs, so we can prepare to zap them before they arrive.

With progress comes challenges, change, loss and gains. Earth is supposed to be one giant Man in the Bubble? I think not.

Our species is not a unique and special snowflake. We're likely to see all kinds of convergent evolution [wikipedia.org]. An example from biology: Cephalopods [wikipedia.org]. (Squids, octopuses, and so on.) We can use Cephalopods to test theories about extraterrestrial life like we can use Antarctica to test Mars rovers.

The most developed of these is the Octopus. Not only do these guys have eyes [bumblebee.org] that are better than our own, but they have brains. This is important because our last common ancestor with these guys had neither brains nor eyes, and was as complex as yeast. Yet the Octopus nervous system has quite a few similarities to our own [biolbull.org]:

The findings emerging from recent electrophysiological studies in the octopus suggest that a convergent evolutionary process has led to the selection of similar networks and synaptic plasticity in evolutionarily very remote species that evolved to similar behaviors and modes of life. These evolutionary considerations substantiate the importance of these cellular and morphological properties for neural systems that mediate complex forms of learning and memory. In particular, the similarity in the architecture and physiological connectivity of the octopus MSF-VL system to the mammalian hippocampus and the extremely high number of small interneurons in its areas of learning and memory suggest the importance of a large number of units that independently, by en passant innervation, form a high redundancy of connections. As these features are found in both the octopus MSF-VL system and the hippocampus, it would appear that they are needed to create a large capacity for memory associations.

Any technological alien civilization would face the same mathematical evolutionary pressures described by game theory, and would develop along lines close to our own. The differences we see between alien cultures and our own will be on the order of the differences between human cultures, and not something radically different.

Why would you suppose that the distance between us and extraterrestrial life would be any greater than that between us and the octopus? We can be reasonably confident that:

The laws of physics and the mathematical realities of game theory are the same everywhere

Life will be carbon-based, because there aren't really any good alternatives. (No, silicon won't work.)

Some kind of organic polymer will be used to encode each orgasm's genetic information, because there really isn't a good alternative. DNA is good choice because it's stable and cheap to make.

Carbon-based life will require roughly the same environment we do. For instance, there will be no creatures that require bio-suits kept at the temperature of molten lead because any reasonable enzyme would denature at that point. Some kind of liquid environment will be needed for chemical reactions to take place in, probably water because it's abundant, simply, and is liquid in the right temperature range.

Organisms will face roughly the same environment challenges we do, and will produce similar results.

Really, we're not going to see off-the-wall organisms. They'll have eyes. They'll have brains. Anything that required technology will require air, fire, and water. Fire requires oxygen, so our aliens will have roughly the same atmospheric needs we do.

That's right. And according to the frame of reference of the traveler, it doesn't take four years to cover four light-years of distance. The traveler could, say, make the distance to Proxima Centauri in just a month by his watch. Some (other) people don't know this.

So single or dual-generation colony ships are feasible if you go fast enough, but the journey is even more one-way than the Altantic crossing to the British Colonies.
At least relativity would make trans-planetary governance difficult, preventing humanity's eggs from being kept all in one basket.

...but it's generating it's own power and is communicating. From http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/mar/HQ_09-052_Kepler_launches.html

Engineers acquired a signal from Kepler at 12:11 a.m. Saturday, after it separated from its spent third-stage rocket and entered its final sun-centered orbit, trailing 950 miles behind Earth. The spacecraft is generating its own power from its solar panels.

Which was in question for about a minute. I was watching the launch on NASA TV and the signal did _not_ get reported when expected. There were a few tense moments and you could see the engineers squirming and getting frustrated. Then the report of the signal came, and a collective "ahh" was heard. Apparently the signal was received on time, but the person in charge of announcing it was a bit late. Or, he was making for drama!

I know that you went for Funny, but I had a similar thought about the two missions last night:

If one of these was doomed to fail, I'm very, very glad it was the one pointing down. We can achieve a lot more looking out than we can looking in. And anyway, we're only stuck here for a couple more centuries at most. I'd even go so far as to say we'll start colonizing the sky before the end of this century.

So knowing where else to go is much more important than knowing more about what processes are going on lo

I know this is obvious to most people but the "habitable zone" is awfully generous. It's hard to gauge the exact amount of heat given off by a star from as far away as we are. Plus, the atmosphere content is extremely important. Our moon is basically the same distance away from the sun as us and with no atmosphere it goes from like -180 to +200 F or something like that. So yeah, it kinda needs to have an exact amount of certain gases to keep water from boiling and freezing repeatedly, which would probably kill everything organic in it. And how are be supposed to tell if it's 40% as opposed to 50% CO2 in the atmosphere from all the way out here? It's impossible and that could mean a huuuuge temperature difference. So even if they find one that's supposedly perfect from what we can detect, it's still extremely likely that it's not.

Exactly, a planets distance from the sun is a far more tolerant variable then its atmospheric makeup whent its comes to habitability, and not only makeup but pressure too, we can actually only survive for a long term within a very small range.

Problem is, you are talking about HUMAN RANGE. It is quite possible for other forms of life to live over much broader range of specs. What is will come to, is if a planet has life, we will probably only figure it out IFF it the planet is similar to us, or if life has made it to similar or further on the evolutionary scale.

Stop bringing this point up as it is for the most part worthless. For starters looking for completely alien types of life is damn near pointless because we would be highly unlikely to recognize it as such. Such life could readily exist on Earth right now but we do not recognize it. Looking for something without knowing what to look for isn't going to be very fruitful. It will be more useful to look for planets and solar systems like ours to look for life like ours. We would be able to recognize it more easi

The surface temperature can be measured by the infrared spectrum the planet is radiating ("surface" might be the cloud top if is too dense). They are not trying to simulate the atmosphere including composition, density, clouds etc. to calculate a temperature.

I know this is obvious to most people but the "habitable zone" is awfully generous. It's hard to gauge the exact amount of heat given off by a star from as far away as we are. Plus, the atmosphere content is extremely important.

If you RTFA you'll see they are after statistics, not detailed data. They want to estimate the number of planets that have approximately the same characteristics as Earth.

The Kepler will keep monitoring the same 100000 stars during five years. The number of planets detected around those stars will give a rough idea on how likely it is to find earth-like planets.

You're right regarding the importance of the atmosphere. In principle you could measure the atmospheric composition through transmission/emission spectroscopy at primary/secondary transit, however this is not feasible in the short term (maybe with 30m class telescopes it could be done). They'll have a hard enough time measuring the masses and securely confirming that any particular one of these things is planet (note the trouble with accurately determining the mass of Corot-Exo-7b for which the velocity sem

The idea is to find potentially life supporting worlds, estimate their numbers, and later point larger telescopes at the best candidates and get spectral data to look for carbon dioxide, oxygen and water.

On the other hand, what if life is tolerant in the beginning. And later when it established a basic biosphere it is capable of creating more favourable conditions for higher life forms (remember the oxygen rich atmosphere was created by bacteria).
Sure the conditions must be favourable but if biospheres in general were not self-regulating systems who can deal with small changes in environmental conditions life on earth would have become extinct a long time ago.

The next step is to build or send up more telescopes to analyse the chemical signature of the atmospheres of all those planets. If there is oxygen and methane in similar proportions as on earth we can suspect that they have similar types of life as we have.

Next step is to launch even better telescopes to look for traces of geoengineering or space construction on massive scales. If there are aliens out there they probably have tentacles reaching into space, figuratively speaking.

The vast majority of people already have it in their minds that there are either aliens, or angels, or both. So, if they find a planet that might have life on it, its not going to be a shocker to anyone but the scientists who trumpet this discovery. For the rest of us, its no big deal at all.

If we can find (by telescope) somewhere worthwhile to go to (ie a habitable planet that we can colonize) then it will be a lot easier to get investment and support for developing ways (FTL drives, ships etc) to go there.

You aren't at all interested in knowing how common the Earth is? Whether the process that lead to the Earth orbiting the sun happens only rarely? What other planets are like? Do many (any?) of them have life, or something like it? If they do, what form does it take, is it like us? While Kepler won't answer all these questions, it's a small, but significant step in a long-term plan to address all of these questions. Even if we never are capable of ever going to any of these planets, I'd still like to know th

Most of planets discovered so far been through the doppler velocity method which is biased to large, fast, close-in planets, because thats what causes the larger and more easily detectable doppler shifts. Kepler use the "transit method" the temporary dimming of a star by a planet crossing in front of it. It should be able see smaller, slower, far out planets.

Modeling suggests about one in thousand stars will have planets and will be tilted in the right way to see planetary transits. Kepler will watch